The aim of this research is to examine the
extent to which the political interaction between NATO and Russia
after the end of the Cold War was the result of rationally driven
policy making processes on behalf of both Russia and NATO member
states and leadership, explainable in terms of neorealism.

Most of the policies that were designed in the
nineties in Europe can be explained using the neorealist
perspective on international politics. Concepts such as balance
of power or threat, or hegemonic change have continued to be
employed of a neorealistic manner by policy-makers in
constructing the post Cold War security configuration. For
example, evidence shows that even though the Cold War balance of
power was broken, the system moved slowly toward a new balance of
power configuration. Some Central and Eastern European nations
looked for an alliance with NATO in order to balance against
Russia and others got into closer ties with Russia. More than
that, NATO was eager to affirm its new role in Europe, frequently
showing its "former" enemy, Russia that the time has
come for Westerners to take up the hegemonic role Russia was
stubbornly willing to keep.

The research uses a qualitative approach in a
search to identify the factors that determined the evolution of
the European security over the last years.

The research is structured in two main parts
with the intention to provide information about the concepts
designed and utilized by the neorealists as well as bout the
possible ways of employing these concepts to explain occurences
of nowadays politics.

The first part  Theoretical Background
 describes the concepts utilized by the neorealists in
giving their explanation of international politics. The
presentation is two-sided  not only we describe the
neorealist conception but we also provide the reader with
information regarding other currents of international affairs.
For an improved understanding, the information is provided by
contrast, emphasising the neorealist pluses or minuses by
comparing the theory with alternative theories furnished by other
international affairs theorists.

The second part is meant to observe how the
neorealist conception can be applied to real-life, nowadays
politics. The database used for the testing covers the period of
time from the end of the Cold War to to Kosovo War. The research
is limitative  we have chosen to use only those events that
seemed relevant to our purpose  to see if the neorealist
conceptions can be successfully employed to explain post-Cold War
international politics. The data used in the research have been
obtained from varios sources  yet, concerning the empirical
data, the main instrument used to collect it was the Internet.
Even if some relevant events were stories in the making when this
paper was writen (such was Kosovo War), a conclusion was made
using the incipient phases of these events, ignoring the
developments that took place after a certain date.

Findings show that the neorealist theory can
successfully be employed to explain events taking place in
International Politics in the ten years that followed the fall of
the Berlin Wall, providing, on the long term, the best
explanation possible to these events.